Hall: A lame lost Padres season lurches to a close

BREAKING

And then there were two. Fox Sports San Diego and AT&T U-Verse have reached a deal to televise the regional sports network, an AT&T spokesman has confirmed. Padres fans can turn to channel 776 and 1776 in HD to watch the final Padres game of the season at 5 p.m., meaning it's not too late for another agreement or two to be reached so everyone can watch the RBI race Wednesday night. The Chase chase equals must-see TV, after all.

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Here’s a friendly reminder for Time Warner Cable, Dish Network and AT&T U-Verse customers: Your last chance to not see the 2012 Padres on Fox Sports San Diego is tonight.

Here’s an unfriendly reminder for those four TV players: You stink.

I’m sorry. Was that too harsh?

No, I don’t think so. And you know what? I’m not sorry.

I should be heading home after work to catch the Padres’ last game of this season, but I can’t because of your greed and your stubbornness. I should be hanging on every pitch each time hometown hitter Chase Headley or Milwaukee’s Ryan Braun steps to the plate, to see which one captures this year’s RBI title.

Only one Padre has ever done that. Dave Winfield did it on Sept. 30, 1979, 24 days after the launch of a little television network called ESPN, whose steady stream of sports programming has turned so many of us into junkies.

The Padres have been mostly bad since 1969, but this season was something else altogether. The team was the worst in the National League through April, and by then few seemed to care that 42 percent of the San Diego County market couldn’t watch the team on TV because of carriage disputes.

As the season wore on, I wrote a series of columns and held a late July rally outside Petco Park to give people, including both San Diego mayoral candidates, the chance to vent about our minor-league TV coverage.

But now this disastrous impasse reminds me of the 2002 mess when nearly 3 million New York area Cablevision customers went a full season without the YES Network or Yankees games. That dispute ended the following year, when mediators worked out a deal in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s townhouse with spring training already underway.

Memo to San Diego’s next mayor: Clean your house in case you have visitors.

Also, it’s not too late to curry favor with Padres fans on this issue. They’re still plenty upset.

Sunday, before the final home game of the season, I stood on a street corner at the site of my July 22 rally and asked ticket holders why they weren’t anywhere else — enjoying the Chargers or air conditioning or both.

By coincidence, I ran into lawyer Richard Stern, who was among the 150 fans at my “Padres to the People” rally. He said he considered heeding my call for season ticket holders to not renew their packages until a distribution deal got done, but decided to keep his seats next season.

“If I don’t get them on TV, if I don’t come to the game, I don’t get to see them,” Stern said. “I’m still pissed off about it. Nothing’s changed, and I don’t know that it will for next season, either.”

Even fans on the other side of San Diego’s Mason-Dixon Line, in the Cox coverage area, are perplexed about the TV impasse.

In the words of San Carlos resident Steve Lachman, blacked-out fans “are disadvantaged through no fault of their own.”

Without prompting from me, Lachman hit on two of the major points fans have raised this year — that the TV impasse is most frustrating to housebound or elderly fans, and to families who can’t afford Padres tickets but love baseball.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Lachman said.

It’s certainly hard to believe that any impasse could stretch into another baseball season. A person familiar with the talks but unauthorized to speak publicly said it’s likely that Dish and AT&T will both show Padres games in 2013.

And Time Warner? Who the Hells Bells knows.

The breakdown in talks is so bad that Fox Sports San Diego senior vice president and general manager Henry Ford couldn’t resist calling out Time Warner one last time.

“A cable operator blacking out a local Major League Baseball team for an entire season is almost unimaginable in this day and age,” Ford said in a statement last week. “I have no reason to believe 2013 will be any different.”

Mindful that Fox Sports San Diego is 20 percent owned by the Padres, I emailed team president Tom Garfinkel on Tuesday to see if he had any parting words for fans about this lame, lost season.

I never heard back, but I didn’t expect to. And I didn’t need to.

That’s because Stern went to a gathering of 50 or 60 season ticket holders before Sunday’s game, asked Garfinkel about the TV dispute, scrawled notes on a set of business cards and then found me inside Petco Park.

Stern said half the hands in the room went up when Garfinkel asked how many guests were Time Warner customers. Dish might have been mentioned in passing, but AT&T?

“He kind of winked a couple of times and said, ‘Don’t worry about AT&T,'” Stern recalled. “He said everything will get done with Time Warner. He said it’s more of a global issue between Fox and Time Warner. ... He hinted that it might happen next season but (gave) no time frame.”

Stern said Garfinkel sounded optimistic and professional and apologized to the fans in the room, then told them something else.

“I guess he switched from Time Warner to DirecTV personally,” Stern recounted, “and he said the picture’s much better.”

Better yet? The TV executives, the team’s new owners and the city’s next mayor will work this out and get the 2013 Padres on all of our televisions.